Sunday, November 8, 2009

The First Post

This is the first post for Lyle's Place.

Lyle's Place is a blog that will feature commentary, cartoons, jokes, stories, photos, photo essays and such other postings and material that I believe will be of interest to our readers. When we use postings from users, that poster will be credited with his/her material submitted. Not all messages will be uploaded to the blog, only those that I believe will continue a theme under discussion, or that will otherwise be of interest to a broad range of our users.

Lyle's Place is free, but moderated. I will likely seek out commercial advertisers to help support the blog.

1 comment:

This is the second post on this new blog from old friend (whom I have never met, other than via the Internet), Kent Ballard. Kent lives in Brazil, Indiana and I will have many posts from him because he is one of the best writers I know. Here's an example;

Thought you'd sneak through a day without hearing anything weird? Well,today's not your day.

This is just flat-out bizarre, bizarre as in "WHAT did you just say"?

The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope was launched to monitor deep space bursts of gamma rays, deadly and unbelievably powerful jets of gamma rays heading our way from the universe. They know a few of the things that cause them, but not all. Black holes tearing other starts apart, supernovas, stellar collisions, godawful events like that.

But the Fermi was not in orbit and functioning long before it started to report anomalous sources of milder, but much CLOSER gamma ray bursts. When they determined the direction from which they were coming, it made no sense at all. So they checked and then re-checked their calculations. You see, the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope is pointed OUTWARDS, towards space. But it was registering gamma ray events from BEHIND itself.

From Earth.

This didn't make any sense. It still doesn't. But there it is. There are now no less than seventeen documented terrestrial gamma ray events. Something was making gamma ray bursts, unbelievably, here on our home planet. What in God's name was going on? Where could such energy come from?

The whole story is linked below. They're still running around in universities and observatories, screaming and tripping over each other and going over all kinds of data they never associated with gamma ray bursts. But they've found the culprits. We had the data. We just didn't know it.

Superpowerful LIGHTNING BOLTS are, apparently, creating positrons, antimatter neutrons if you will, and like all matter-antimatter events, these join with the normal matter in our atmosphere and literally annihilate an equal amount of normal matter, giving off gamma rays as a telltale sign of an "annihilation event", the merging and total destruction which takes place when matter and antimatter come into contact with each other. This is pure energy. Pure. There is no event or process known to man which gives off more energy than a matter-antimatter event.

Even just a tiny few positrons give off hellacious energy. If superpowerful lighting gave off enough positrons, it'd be worse, much worse, than nukes detonating. We can make antimatter, a few positrons at a time, but we hold them tightly in magnetic fields so they don't blow the laboratories apart. But these previously unknown positrons are just out there, flying through our "normal matter" atmosphere.

This is not supposed to be possible. But it happens, and they just discovered it, and they have absolutely no idea how, why, what physical processes are involved, or anything at all about it except that the laughable notion of antimatter being created by nature itself, here on Earth, is undeniably true.

Two stories here, the first an introduction into this seemingly ridiculous notion, and the second the hard scientific facts about how they tracked it down and discovered it was lightning which was behind all this.

That's the trick of it with science. Just when you think you have a handle on how the universe works, something comes along and knocks the props out from everything you "knew" the day before.

About Me

I am a retired broadcaster (radio)_ of 25 years. Served in 1967 and 1968 as a war correspondent in S. Vietnam. Owned a fishing/boating resort for 27 years "Lyle's at Dixon Lake," in Escondido, Ca. Owned a beach concession, "Lyle's at Moonlight Beach," in Encinitas, California for 17 years. Am divorced, still good friends with my ex, have two grown sons, Scott and Kenny. Have been one half of a couple with Evelyn for over eight years. Love dogs, tolerate cats. We have five in the house, two of which are kittens.